Top row, from left: Julia Schultz, Mervyn Broom (RBC), Tara Taylor, Lily Falk, Jamie Bradley (Mentor), Sam Horak, Chuck Homewood (Mentor). Bottom row, from left: Briony Merritt, Ryan Gallant, Pamela Halstead (Executive Director PARC), Sam Rosenthal (Former EFT Artistic Producer). Not pictured: Santiago Guzman, Edie Reaney Chunn, Anna Shepard, Emma Vickers, Abby Weisbrot, Natalie Meisner (Mentor) and Catherine Banks (Mentor)
Our Playwrights
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Lily Falk
Lily Falk is an emerging theatre artist living in K'jipuktuk (Halifax). She is co-artistic director of Gale Force heatre and an emerging sound designer with Neptune Theatre's 2019/20 Chrysalis Project. Her first play, Crypthand, was developed at the 2019 PARC Colony and won the Best Original Script award at the 2019 Halifax Fringe Festival. When she isn't writing, her work spans puppetry, audio storytelling, and devised creation. The Play: Crypthand is inspired by the 19th century diarist, Anne Lister who wrote in a secret code of her own invention, to recount her desire and encounters with other women. A workshop production of the piece premiered at the 2019 Halifax Fringe Festival. |
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Santiago Guzmán
Santiago Guzmán is a theatre and filmmaker originally from Mexico City, now based in St. John's, NL. He holds a BFA in Theatre from Memorial University, Grenfell Campus. Santiago has worked with CBC NL, White Rooster Theatre, Rising Tide Theatre, Shakespeare By The Sea Festival, Blue Pinion Films, The Nickel Independent Film Festival, NIFCO, and CNA Digital Filmmaking Program. He is the Artistic Director of the newly created TODOS Productions: Theatre and Film for All, an organization that seeks to promote, produce, and support work of under-represented artists in Newfoundland and Labrador. It is in Santiago’s keen interest to promote diversity onstage and onscreen, to encourage folks with diverse backgrounds to share their talents and stories with the arts community of Newfoundland and Labrador and, most importantly, to exhort Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to see their homeland from a diverse perspective. The Play: URN explores the relationship of Newfoundland and Labrador with the Basque community in Placentia Bay and the Basque region of Spain, during the 16th Century. |
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Sam Horak
Sam Horak is a writer, producer and theatre creator. Past highlights include The Coast’s ‘Best of’ bronze winner, Sissydude, a dandy rock musical (co-producer, director and dramaturge) and Halifax Fringe award winning Sit on My Face (co-writer, producer and director). For the past few years Horak has been busy writing two full length scripts. Her first, Kitchen, a show about artists working in the restaurant industry, was workshopped last year through PARC with direction by Laura Vingoe-Cram. Her second features her love of feminist punk rock and the Riot Grrrl movement. Horak hopes to continue exploring the producing and writing side of storytelling while maintaining her strong interest in feminist narratives. The Play: Rock n Roll Saved My Life is a darkly comedic and hyper meta tale about a young punk rock women discovering how to use her past traumas to fuel her art. A playwright sets out to present a flashy show about how “rock n roll saved her life” but everything goes awry when she is confronted by her past self; a young punk rock women struggling with mental health issues and a sexual assault. After much judgement and denial, she finally finds acceptance with herself. |
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New Pants Project (Edie Reaney Chunn, Julia Schultz, Kristen Bruce & Anna Shepard)
The New Pants Project is a group of emerging artists Julia Schultz, Edie Reaney-Chunn, and Anna Shepard. They share an interest in the non-literal, the poetic, and the innovative, and create theatre in a heightened style of lightness and radical softness. How The Light Lies (On You) was their first collaboration in this configuration, though they have all worked together previously on various projects. In this sense they are the same artists in a slightly different outfit, and have therefore donned New Pants. Schultz and Reaney Chunn collectively wrote Door Play (King’s Infringement Festival), and collaborated on a new work entitled I Believe This Is What Happened, based on the life and legacy of feminist and modernist painter Florine Stettheimer. In Stettheimer’s paintings, the group found a visual version of the theatre they strived to create -- it was excessive, feminine, unapologetic, and joyful. In her poetry they found a voice and style that floated and sang, abandoning the literal in favour of the poetic, the symbolic, and the surreal. Schultz, Reaney Chunn, and Shepard all worked on Steady Theatre Collective’s February 2019 production of Macbeth, in the respective roles of director, musician, and stage manager. At this time the group began discussions on a second workshop of I Believe This Is What Happened, with Shepard joining the group as projection, lighting, and set designer, and deviser for new content. From May to August 2019, the New Pants Project developed and mounted this new play, renamed How the Light Lies (On You), with four public performances in August 2019 at NSCAD’s Art Bar. They are now planning further development for this work in preparation for presentation at Eastern Front’s Stages festival, and future touring. The Play: How the Light Lies (On You) captures the life, legacy, and art of modernist painter and poet Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) and her sisters Carrie and Ettie. In spite of the admiration Stettheimer received from the likes of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keefe, and Marcel Duchamp, her own works never achieved comparable recognition, and at the end of her life Florine requested that Ettie burn all of her paintings. How the Light Lies (On You) opens with a recollection of this request, and explores the emotional avenues that may have led to Stettheimer’s desire to obliterate her creative work. |
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Tara Taylor
Tara Taylor, currently the co-founder and volunteer Festival Director for The Emerging Lens Film Festival, filmmaker, playwright, actress, visual artist and singer; has been a full-time filmmaker and worked in the film industry as a whole for 19 years in various roles. A current member of AFCOOP, Program Committee and Board Member for Centre for Art Tapes and Bus Stop Theatre, Vice Chair for Link Performing Arts society, Co-founder for the Melanated Artist Collective board member of Screen Nova Scotia. A graduate of the Centre for Art Tapes’ media scholarship program, Tara has screened her short films in various places, casted local talent in features and TV shows and has co–coordinated youth media arts March Break Video Camps. Tara has also sang tenor with the former group called “Chosen” who had their debut performance at the Alderney Landing Theatre, under the direction of Erin Jordan and Eric Crookshank; as well as produced and in some cases starred in, “Dreamgirls”, “The Color Purple” and “The Wiz”, and wrote an original musical about the life of Viola Desmond staged at The Spatz theatre in 2018. Tara is currently working on the organizations’ second original musical entitled “Hood Habits” in collaboration with creator, Curtis Bell, former CFL player and co-founder of 9 Heavens Academy and NSCAD animation students. By day she is an entrepreneur and multidisciplinary artist; by night a mom. Her vision for upcoming filmmakers, artists and musicians from marginalized communities is to see them continue in the industry professionally and successfully. She has successfully worked with Screen Nova Scotia’s Executive Director to give 8 new Black filmmakers complimentary memberships to pursue their film dreams, April 2019. The Play: Lila Johnson takes over the legacy of her grandmothers’ salon and renames it, “Love, Peace and Hairgrease” Hair studio plus; an Ebonics term meaning “bye”. This venture has come at a great cost. When they told her she couldn’t, she did anyway. How does one find love and peace in the midst of Hairgrease and life storms? Say bye to … fear, scrub boyfriends, old habits, relaxers, wigs, weaves, and stressed HAIR! |
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BARE Theatre Co. (Ryan Gallant, Briony Merritt, Emma Vickers & Abby Weisbrot)
BARE Theatre Co consists of Ryan Gallant, Briony Merritt, Emma Vickers, and Abby Weisbrot, four emerging artists based in Atlantic Canada. After creating and performing together at Festival Antigonish this summer, we were each given one piece of a miniature tea set to take home with us: a mug, a sugar bowl, a creamer, and … a tiny teapot. Together, we hope to combine our passions for scriptwriting, songwriting, and performing to create productions that explore Maritime history and imagine possible futures. As part of Eastern Front Theatre’s Emerging Playwrights Program, we are currently devising a musical production that focuses on the experience of Atlantic Canadians during times of radical social change. The play: The Station - Four stories, four time periods, one location: a Trans-Atlantic Cable Station at the edge of Nova Scotia. Tiny Teapot’s upcoming musical production shines a light on the small moments so often forgotten in the aftermath of huge societal change. These are the moments that won’t get broadcast. |
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